Ray Weapons
Invisible Death In 1965, within the heavily contested Henan province, a PLA tank battalion stumbled into a hidden Blue Chinese base. The base's garrison was quickly alerted to their presence, and in the brief ensuing skirmish the battalion was almost completely wiped out, save for a few survivors who barely managed to limp back to their superiors and report their discovery. Obviously, this was highly unfortunate for the tank battalion, but a boon for the Red Chinese. By this time in the war, both sides were fighting for any advantage they could get, material or technological. As such, plans were quickly drawn up for an assault, and a large People's Liberation Army force was sent out to secure the base. Though the NRA defenders fought valiantly, they were heavily outnumbered and were soon overwhelmed by the PLA forces, who proceeded to comb the entire base for any valuable research. They soon found what it was the Blue Chinese had been protecting; a radiation projector. Analysis of the captured device by Red Chinese scientists soon revealed more details about it. To the best of their ability, the Red Chinese scientists were able to determine that it was a heavily modified spectrum beam generator, tampered with by the Blue Chinese extensively. Unlike a spectrum beam generator, the Blue Chinese device was calibrated to produce radiation of the x-ray frequencies. It was obvious what the Blue Chinese had been trying to develop. A death ray. The Power of Jade Immediately, the Red Chinese set about to reverse engineer the weapon for their own ends. Creating a workable death ray, however, would not prove to be such an easy feat for the Red Chinese. There were some successes, such as the creation of a projector that could produce radiation of the gamma frequency. Then the project ran into a major roadblock; lack of power. The captured projector, to the scientists' dismay, proved to be far less powerful than they would have liked. Despite their best efforts, the Red Chinese had difficulty raising the power of the radiation projector to lethal levels; though larger prototypes could produce a beam of radiation powerful enough to kill a man, they were far too inefficient and far too bulky. Unimpressed by the lack of progress, the Red Chinese switched their focus to other, seemingly more promising projects. Research would continue, even so, until the end of the war, when the atomic bombs put an end to the lives of the scientists working on the project. Eventually, the abandoned facility was found by forces of the Atomic Kingdom, guided to the location by the Viceroy. Quick to salvage the precious technology within, the Atomic Chinese, too, looked into how they could increase the power of the projector. Unlike the Red Chinese, they succeeded. Thanks to Jade, working ray weapons were developed, ones that were powerful enough to be lethal and compact enough to be usable by a person or mobile platform. Atomic Chinese ray weapons are best described as generating an initial beam of gamma-ray photons, which is then "amplified" by a Jade lens. Though the exact mechanism of this is not well understood even by the Atomic Chinese, it is believed what happens is that the beam of high energy photons destabilises the Jade, causing it to emit an even more intense beam of gamma-ray photons. Better still, this beam can be used to then induce a second Jade lens to emit a burst of gamma-rays, in effect amplifying the beam. Repeated enough times with enough 'lenses', one will get an lethal blast of gamma-ray photons that can reduce even tanks to molten slag. Of course, this degrades the Jade over time; eventually, a 'lens' will require replacement with a new one. To increase the destructive power of a ray gun is a simple matter of passing the gamma ray beam through multiple Jade lenses; the most powerful ray weapons the Atomic Chinese use can require the beam to be amplified dozens of times. It should be noted, however, that the ray weapon designs employed by the Atomic Chinese are extremely inefficient; even the beam of the least powerful ray weapon must be amplified several times to even have any useful destructive power. Category:Technology